Students still drop behind other countries

Australian school students are still flatlining in maths and science tests while other countries surge ahead.

The latest results from the Trends in International Mathematics and Science Study shows Australian students haven't moved out of the middle of the pack in 20 years of testing.

But they have slipped backwards in rankings as students in other countries improve.

The study looks at how well Year 4 and Year 8 students have mastered maths and science lessons, asking questions like how many legs an insect has, which animals lay eggs and what the angles in a triangle add up to.

The Australian Council for Educational Research, which reports on the four-yearly study, says it should be a wake-up call.

Of particular concern is the long tail on results, the council's Sue Thomson says.

Between a quarter and a third of Australian students are still not meeting the proficient standard.

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"In terms of children in classrooms, that's probably seven or eight students in your average 25-student classroom," Dr Thomson told AAP.

"That is a big worry and it's not something that's changed over the last 20 years."

Overall, since 2011 Australian students have:

* Slipped 10 places in rankings for Year 4 maths (18th to 28th)

* Made no progress in Year 4 science (steady at 25th)

* Dropped five places for Year 8 maths (12th to 17th) and science (12th to 17th).

But Dr Thomson says the results only reveal the problem, not solutions.

It could be that Australia has not set its sights high enough, with the "proficient" standards here set just above the TIMSS intermediate level.

"Since TIMSS 2011 we haven't really put in much that would lift performance at those lower benchmarks so nothing really has happened," Dr Thomson said.

She highlighted the huge role socio-economic background - measured by the number of books at home - played in a student's success.

If just the results from the richest students were used, they would be among the top eight countries in the world, whereas those from poorer families are within the bottom quarter.

"I'm not necessarily going to relate it to funding, however we're back at the table insofar as school funding goes and we're still finding that disadvantaged students from disadvantaged schools are those who are not achieving well in these sort of tests," Dr Thomson said.

"They're the ones we need to be targeting to try and improve their achievement."

Education Minister Simon Birmingham said the fascination of some with how much money was being spent in schools came at the detriment of examining its distribution and what would actually boost results.

He will use the maths and science results as a key part of his mid-December discussions with state counterparts about a new funding agreement.

But Labor said it was disingenuous to use the TIMSS results to say Gonski funding hadn't made any difference because students were tested in 2014, when less than 10 per cent of the total money had gone to schools.

"Both Liberal and Labor state governments know the positive difference extra needs based funding is making in their schools - that's why they have put politics aside to campaign together against Malcolm Turnbull's cuts."